Kasper Weilbach
Undergraduate and graduate from University of Copenhagen, with a degree in climate and sea level changes through Holocene.
Master thesis in climate and environmental changes during Late Glacial and Holocene. The project described the transformation from marine to fresh water environments in a closing lake system, in a region with rising sea level and contemporary isotactic uplift.
For the GLANAM project, I will be working on a PhD at Durham University, on the topic, Late Quaternary glaciation of the continental shelf offshore of NW Ireland.
A better understanding of the advance, extent and retreat of the BIIS from the LGM and onwards, can give us a better understanding of forces and feedback mechanisms, influencing the climate. The aim of this project is to reconstruct the extent and nature of the BIIS advance and retreat cycle from LGM and onward, onto the continental shelf offshore of Northern Ireland. The position of the NW Ireland ice sheet close to the North Atlantic Ocean provides a possibility for obtaining an excellent understanding of ocean forcing on ice sheets during the LGM, in the form of global sea level and sea surface temperature.
Marine sediment cores from the area will be the basis for this project. I will apply multi-proxy analysis involving sedimentology, micropalaeontology and chronology on a series of cores sampled on the shelf from the coast to the margin, in order to obtain a detailed history of the retreat of the LGM ice sheet.
